1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a document processing apparatus and a document processing method and particularly to a document processing apparatus and a document processing method for merging objects split over pages.
2. Description of the Related Art
With recent growing demands for the efficiency for all resources, a technique for reducing the number of printed sheets is also demanded in the field of printing. Techniques currently being developed include a technique for advancing N-up printing and a technique for reducing the number of printed sheets by way of print saving to remove a space between objects.
In the print saving, a satisfactory completeness of finished form may not be obtained simply by removing a space between objects. For example, when printing a piece of spreadsheet application data having no page concept through a printer driver, an object may be arranged over a plurality of pages although it should be printed as one table, as illustrated in FIG. 1.
When a phenomenon as illustrated in FIG. 1 occurs, an object running off to another page consumes one page although the amount of such piece of object is very small. When print saving is simply performed, although the entire data may fit into one page by reducing the size of each piece of object and removing a space between pieces of the object, the original data form is not likely to be restored, which degrades readability.
Further, once application data is converted to other formats, attribute information denoting that the data is one object may disappear and only drawing information remains.
There is a primitive method for rebuilding application data of a document so that objects once split over pages may fit into one page, and then converting the data to other formats. However, rebuilding the application data is very time-consuming. Further, it is conceivable that after application data of a document is converted to another format and delivered in a document system, the application data of the document is lost and cannot be rebuild.
In recent years, a technique for merging transmitted split objects into one in a comparatively large system has been discussed (for example, in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2000-215010).
The above-mentioned technique merges as one object the image data once split into a set of a plurality of objects while the image data is originally represented as one object on one page. This means that the technique is not applicable to merging objects split over pages. More specifically, the technique is applicable only to merging a plurality of fragmental objects arranged without a space therebetween, into one. Therefore, the technique has a problem that it cannot re-merge objects split over pages into one.